Harry Clifton

Where the Soul Goes Naked

Stripping for death not love,
I lose myself in the Chinese crowd.
We have no shame,
There is nothing to prove,
And none of us needs a name.
Everything has been said before
In this or another language.
Steam surrounds us, we are ghosts
Resurrected from self-image,
Clothes on the bath-house floor.
An earth-gnome, batlike ears
And giant phallus, gives me the eye.
Where are the women now, I cry,
My Xiaoqin, my Wenming Dai?
Where are all those years?
We are setting out, a host of souls,
The fiction of gender
Behind us, the pathos of roles —
Of time and distance, Xian, Chengdu,
Of passports and controls,
The pathos of history, Sichuan strikes,
Of railwaymen in 1911,
Stevedores in Shanghai,
Of Mao Tse-Tung and Chou En Lai
And dreams of an earthly heaven.
Setting out, we are setting out
Past Xinchan range
And Lingquan temple, time and change,
Forbidden City, Tianenmen,
After the end, before the beginning
Brings us round again.
An accidental brush of lips
Might save me now, or one winged seed
I keep inside the leaves of a book
For just this hour of total need
And zero expectation —
Something to cling to, conjure with,
Something with which to grow
Tomorrow, through another death,
Another incarnation.